Tracking security and privacy trends across UK, Europe and beyond

Information security is hot in Europe. To wit: The Black Hat Europe conference in Amsterdam broke attendance records. While 800 people were projected to attend, total attendance topped 1,000, which is double the audience seen last year.

Watch the Wi-Fi: Like "Fight Club," Black Hat Europe has one overriding rule, although you can talk about it: Never, ever use the Wi-Fi. Because no matter how great your hacker mojo, odds are you're going to get owned by a hotspot vulnerability you never saw coming, unless you've attended the related 3 p.m. briefing.

Beware Bluetooth: While Black Hat lacks Defcon's renowned Wall of Sheep - which lists the passwords of anyone who's been silly enough to use the Wi-Fi - events took a decidedly more modern turn this year, with Symantec security researcher Candid WÃ¼eest surreptitiously cataloging all devices that were using Bluetooth low energy, or BTLE. Luckily for attendees, however, WÃ¼eest's goals centered on researching wearable-computing devices and privacy.

Get Fit: Out of a conference of 1,000 people, on the first day of Black Hat, WÃ¼eest tells me he saw 203 active BTLE devices, many of which he believes were beacons. Perhaps surprisingly for a crowd that often prides itself on its consumption of Club-Mate - a caffeinated, carbonated, mate-extract beverage - WÃ¼eest even found 21 fitness wearables, including 7 Fitbit Flex, 4 Jawbone UP24, 3 Fitbit One, and 2 Nike devices. But he does admit that at least one of the wearables was being worn not by an attendee, but rather by an Amsterdam RAI staff member he had to trail for several minutes, to record usable data.

WÃ¼eest also saw 10 Nokia phones, as well as 11 BlackBerry devices. "So they are still popular," he tells me - or at least as popular as wearable fitness devices at a hacking convention.

Make Mine "Raspberry Pi": Forget MiFi routers, SOHO devices or Shodan-enabled hacks. While those have been hot topics at previous Black Hat Europe conferences, the autumn 2014 de rigueur hacker accessory is, without a doubt, Raspberry Pi. For those not in the know, that's a credit-card-sized computer that packs as much punch as a desktop CPU from just four or five years ago, while only costing about $60 for a well-equipped model with case.

Examples of innovative Raspberry Pi use abounded:

Alexey Osipov and fellow penetration-testing expert Olga Kochetova using theirs to hack ATMs without using malware;

Endrun creators Brendan O'Connor and Grant Dobbe, perhaps achieving maximum hacker cred, not only using theirs as nodes in a disruption-tolerant network they created, but packaging them in a bright-orange case, custom-made by O'Connor using a 3D printer.

About the Author

Schwartz is an award-winning journalist with two decades of experience in magazines, newspapers and electronic media. He has covered the information security and privacy sector throughout his career. Before joining Information Security Media Group in 2014, where he now serves as the Executive Editor, DataBreachToday and for European news coverage, Schwartz was the information security beat reporter for InformationWeek and a frequent contributor to DarkReading, amongst other publications. He lives in Scotland.